My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!?

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

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Review:

My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!? Is a Visual Novel first released on PC in 2018 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2019. It focuses on the story of a young man named Hiroto who returns to a stream near the hometown of his youth to find his female childhood friend Ion has somehow turned into a mermaid.

As you might imagine, this is a development that Hiroto finds surprising, but that’s not to say that his reaction to this is a natural one. Honestly, all of the characters in this game act is a bizarre manner that doesn’t quite make sense – Hiroto is oddly fixated on his idea of what “science” is and what it supposedly means to “be a man”, Ion is extremely mild-mannered but oddly resorts to violent reprisals with a hair-trigger response before falling back to childish innocence, and of course no one openly says what they’re truly feeling because that’s how these things work in anime-inspired media, isn’t it?

The problems with this game’s characters and story aren’t just a matter of this being a game fashioned in the anime mold, though. The localization here is genuinely awful, making the characters sound childish and simple-minded in a way that I don’t think was the intention of the original game’s script, and making the dialogue and narration not only extremely stilted to the point of being difficult to follow, but also presented in a way that makes dialogue fade into internal dialogue, which fades into narration, all in a way that makes it difficult to determine which is which.

And then of course there’s the unavoidable ecchi element to this game. With a title like My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!?, that’s undoubtedly unavoidable, but its presence here is nevertheless frustrating for refusing to commit to whether or not it actually wants to be an ecchi game. Ion is dressed in a revealing outfit that clings to her due to her usually being wet, and the protagonist is extremely fixated on this, specifically alluding to her breasts a lot… while at the same time occasionally commenting how he sees this girl as a sister. She doesn’t seem to be at all shy about stripping her clothes off in public, until the protagonist makes it clear that he’s actually looking at her, resulting in her physically attacking him with a tail-slap.

The actual visuals here don’t actually show anything too revealing, though they do that thing where 2D anime-style artwork is animated to appear to be moving somewhat, and naturally female characters’ breasts receive a great deal of attention in this regard. Aside from this, the artwork here is generally good, and the background music is sufficient, befitting an anime, but nothing especially noteworthy. I should note that the game does have a video intro, but there’s nothing visually impressive about it and in fact I found myself being put off by the way it was inexplicably stuttering.

One final note before I wrap things up here – for those wondering, this game does support the Nintendo Switch’s touchscreen, though that hardly seems necessary, since usually all you’ll be doing is pressing a button regularly to progress the story. There are occasional points where players are given multiple choices to influence the story, which can actually lead to multiple endings depending on those choices.

Overall, My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!? May have an interesting premise that could have made for a decent dramatic story or a fun ecchi story. But the game’s inability to decide which of those it wants to be and its horrible localization deprive the game of any chance it had to be a story worth following. It doesn’t do a good job of appealing to the head or the heart, it’s not really naughty enough to appeal to those looking for more perverse fun, and more than anything the terrible localization just makes for a confusing and unsatisfying experience.

tl;dr – My Girlfriend is a Mermaid!? Is a Visual Novel about a young man who returns to a stream near the hometown of his youth to find his childhood friend has somehow turned into a mermaid. Unfortunately, this game isn’t compelling enough to be a story you’ll want to follow, isn’t sleazy enough to be a guilty pleasure, and features a terrible localization that will leave you scratching your head. While there was some potential here, that is potential that has not been realized in any way.

Grade: D+

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